During this year’s World Series, millions of baseball fans will have their eyes turned to Nationals Park, with the new skyline of Half Street SE beyond the left field line. But if federal planners from the 1960s had their way, that view could have been of a tremendous Brutalist office compound instead of a ballfield, dining/entertainment venues, and thousand […]

One frequently-heard retort to any call to allow more housing construction is a single statistic: There are 17 million vacant houses, more than 30 for every American experiencing homelessness during the 2018 Point-In-Time survey. While those vacant houses do exist, they exist for complicated reasons—and any serious plan to address the housing shortage requir […]

We published this post on April 13, 2017. We’re sharing it again for a fun read over the weekend. When Metro began painting the interior of one of its original stations in 2017, the ensuing uproar shone a spotlight on how unpainted concrete surfaces are a part of the area’s architectural heritage. Metro was just one part of a building boom that swept Washing […]

Recently, I rode in two of the best-known group bike rides in urban America: WABA’s 50 States Ride, which hits all the state-named avenues in a 62-mile trip, and Transportation Alternatives’ NYC Century, a 100-mile trip through four boroughs. I was seriously surprised to discover that the much shorter ride around DC was considerably more tiring. Sure, the mu […]

Stadium subsidies are a waste of public funds, according to polls of both the general public and and economists. Amidst this nearly universal disdain, politicians have found inventive shell games that cloak colossal giveaways of taxpayer resources to billionaire sports team owners. Two of these charades have already been hinted at in news reports about what […]